if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.

Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. . . . It's the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.

Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.